The list, called “Yes, at Google,” is a grassroots effort to collect anonymous submissions at Google and parent Alphabet Inc. and communicate them across the company, according to five current employees who receive the emails. “Yes, at Google” tracks allegations of unwelcome behavior at work in an attempt to make the company more inclusive, said the employees, who did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak about internal company matters. Since starting in October, more than 15,000 employees – 20 percent of the company’s workforce – have subscribed, according to two of those people.

Google management is aware of the list. “We work really hard to promote and preserve a culture of respect and inclusion,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “Our employees have numerous ways to raise issues – both negative and positive – with us, including through grassroots transparency efforts like this one. We take concerns seriously and take appropriate measures to address them.”

This is a great initiative, and adds a ton of accountability into the reporting process for these matters. I wonder if you could complain if your brand new headquarters has every amenity from a huge gym to a massive wellness centre (…what even?), but no daycare.

About The Author

13 Comments

I have a feeling this mailing list will lead to the formation of castes inside the company and eventually lead to character assassination attempts and the harassment of “undesirables” or minority groups.

After what was revealed about Marissa Mayer “purging” males from Yahoo’s management ranks, and about the horrible behaviour of Uber’s management towards female employees, I have trust that both genders can misuse the list in such a way: Are you a caste of broken people (male or female) with a grudge on the other gender? A series of complaint letters targeted to some people of the other gender full of bogus claims will allow you to vent your spleen anonymously.

And this is the reason other companies have HR policies preventing such lists and have a policy to shut down such lists. But, you know, Silicon Valley thinks the entire world outside the Valley is always wrong and they are always right.

I wonder if you could complain if your brand new headquarters has every amenity from a huge gym to a massive wellness centre (…what even?), but no daycare.

Those poor things! Seriously, after reading that I think we need a new term to describe extreme levels of oblivious entitlement – because “First World Problem” seems like ironic understatement in this context.

I wonder if you could complain if your brand new headquarters has every amenity from a huge gym to a massive wellness centre (…what even?), but no daycare.

Those poor things! Seriously, after reading that I think we need a new term to describe extreme levels of oblivious entitlement – because “First World Problem” seems like ironic understatement in this context.

The real purpose of these facilities is to keep employees on campus and working huge amounts of unpaid overtime.

As long as it doesn’t become an excuse for self-righteous moral busybodies to police the personal lives of other employees…

Did anyone else follow the kerfuffle over Drupal developer Larry Garfield being expelled from his leadership role after his ‘problematic’ male dominant sex life was exposed?

What I found chilling was that members of the feminist ‘diversity and inclusion’ crowd were upset that there was nothing in the code of conduct to allow him to be officially punished for his private life. They saw nothing wrong with outing and doxxing Garfield, or publicly smearing him as a dangerous abuser and misogynist, merely because his wrongkink made them feel uncomfortable in their ‘safe space’.

It didn’t seem to matter that there was no evidence of him actually behaving in a sexist way towards the women he worked with. Men who were uncomfortable with his treatment were labelled women-hating alt-right Gamergate trolls, and of course women who defended him were denounced as filthy gender traitors.

To me that kind of agenda-driven drama is an argument for leaving workplace disputes to professional HR, with set rules in place for behaviour, rather than relying on an anonymous mob.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I’m not going to pretend to understand modern feminism, but there are some definite sexuality-related ideological differences between the 3rd wave/intersectional feminism influential in tech, and the old school ‘sex war’ era 2nd wave.

Also, I think a lot of the hate towards Garfield was due to his ‘problematic’ opinions rather than just his sex life. Some people who jumped on the ‘misogynistic abuser’ bandwagon were already after his scalp due to various ‘unacceptable’ things he’d said.

For example, these are comments condemned as ‘racist’, ‘sexist’, and ‘exclusionary’ by his critics:

I’ve seen a number of people argue that those comments/opinions should be reason enough to exclude him from the community. The fact that he was tolerated until his kink was outed is seen as a failure that needs to be corrected.

Of course a lot of the ‘diversity and inclusion’ crowd are just happy to see a ‘privileged white cisgender male’ get knocked down a peg or two, regardless of whether he actually did anything wrong.

I wonder how many of the anonymous complaints of ‘sexism, bigotry or racism’ at Google are in response to similar expressions of politically incorrect opinion, rather than unambiguous abuse or discrimination?

Not only does this sound like mob justice, but also I fear it will only trivialize “harassment” and basically every rude comment ever will get you on that list. That will, naturally, lead to actual harassment being buried under a ton of everyday whining. And that’ll lead to comments such “oh, but that’s not REAL harassment, please don’t post here” etc.

…where “sexual harassment” most likely means turning head because some beautiful woman walked past or saying such innocuous things like “nice shirt/skirt”, “you look great today” or “you have wonderful hair”.